"You haven't been to Hestercombe!"

"Not yet. I —"

"But you must go. It's a Gertrude Jekyll garden, one of her best. You know who Gertrude Jekyll is, of course?"

"Of course. And I —"

"Then go and see Hestercombe, soon. No excuses. It's open to the public."

On the train from London down to Somerset, Julia Dobson recalled this exchange with the elderly distant cousin who had been her hostess for an extended visit to the Chelsea Flower Show. It did seem odd that she had never been to Hestercombe, only a short drive from Flora Cottage.

She knew that it was reckoned one of the finest Edwin Lutyens-Gertrude Jekyll gardens, a marvelous congruence of design and nature set in the Somerset countryside. It was a curious collaboration. Sir Edwin Lutyens was a dapper young architect who, beginning in the 1890s, was commissioned by wealthy Englishmen to create houses and gardens that drew their inspiration from the Tudor period. Many of his most successful creations were renovations of existing houses, and the redesigned gardens were the crowning glory. Gertrude Jekyll, a stout woman of stern appearance, was old enough to be Lutyens's mother. Her role was to provide the flesh for Sir Edwin's architectural skeletons. His graceful terraces and steps, walls, and paths were a framework that she filled with sweeps of harmonious color, making lavish use of the humble flowers of cottage gardens and bringing her artist's eye and gardener's knowledge of plants to the task.

As the train sped toward Somerset that May afternoon, Julia knew that she would go to Hestercombe at the first opportunity. What she did not know was that she would make several visits to Hestercombe in the next few weeks and that she would find a body in the garden.

The first thing that she noticed on arrival at Flora Cottage was the clematis in bloom over the front door. It was a small-flowered variety, delicately colored, a scattering of fragile pink stars across the gray stone wall. I've never seen it in bloom before, she realized. I must not have been home before in May.

Is "home" the appropriate word? she asked herself as she fumbled for her key. Yet the gray stone cottage was beginning to seem like home. She walked up the short flagstone path with a proprietorial step, casting a disapproving glance at the crumpling red tulips lined up on either side. The white front door with its gleaming brass handle and slit for letters appeared to be welcoming her as resident, not visitor. After all, she reflected, I have learned to put down roots quickly. That was essential in the kind of life we lived. We couldn't let life slip by while we waited for a permanent home.

She pushed the door open to find four days' worth of post and newspapers on the mat. She put down her suitcase and picked up the post: a bill and an air letter from America addressed to her and several circulars and a catalogue all addressed to her parents. How long does it take before that stops? she wondered.

This was the reality of Flora Cottage despite the starry clematis and the welcoming front door. It was still strange to come into this house as her own, not theirs, to hear not their warm greeting but only the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall and the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. I should get a dog or a cat, she said to herself half seriously, forcing herself to cope as people expected. "Julia is such a strong person," she had overheard someone say at the memorial service. "She is badly hurt, but she will survive."

I suppose I must be a survivor, she thought. Frank had helped her through the terrible weeks last winter after her parents were killed in a car accident. But there had been no one to play that role when Frank's plane had slammed into an Andean mountainside. Emma had tried, but Emma had to cope with her own grief at the loss of her father. She was also beginning to shape an independent life for herself, embarking on a career in the north of England. It wouldn't have been fair to lean on her. And Emma wouldn't understand that Julia's keenest pain came from the guilt of her own survival, that she should still be alive, still delighting in the daffodils, while Frank would never see another spring.

It would be so easy to give in, to sink down on the stairs and cry, and perhaps she'd feel better afterward if she allowed herself to succumb. But she had acquired self-discipline along with other diplomatic traits. The steel core that others had observed took control, forced her to move on into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, she went back into the hall to hang up her coat. She paused for a moment in front of the hall mirror, scrutinizing the figure reflected there. The last few months had taken their toll on her face. The fine mesh of wrinkles under her eyes and the gray hairs now sprouting on her dark curly head undoubtedly owed something to her age. You couldn't escape these signs of maturity once you reached the midforties. But the weight she had lost under the strain showed in her face as much as elsewhere on her small frame. The clear brown eyes that stared back at her uncompromisingly were etched with pain. And yet, she told herself, I have not let myself go. I look after myself.

The whistling kettle recalled her to the kitchen. A few minutes later, Julia was sitting in the small conservatory at the back of the cottage, a tray beside her with teapot and milk jug and a plate of chocolate biscuits, the newspapers and post in a pile at her feet. She sniff ed the milk suspiciously, but it was still fresh.

Through the windows of the conservatory, she could see that the blossom had finally fallen from the huge apple tree that dominated the lawn. Two pots of geraniums in the corner provided a splash of color in what was basically a monochrome room defined by the gray stone wall of the cottage, the white painted doors and framework of the conservatory, and the black and white tiled floor. Julia had often chided her parents for not adding more plants. This could be used as a greenhouse, she decided, sipping the hot tea. I shall buy some tomato plants. Dare I try a grape vine?

It was time to start making some decisions. Everyone had warned her not to move too quickly, not to make hasty decisions. But it was now six months since her parents' fatal car crash, three months since Frank's plane went down. There were practical decisions she could make, small steps, not major moves, things like planting, rearranging, redecorating, anything that reinforced for her that life was going on without necessarily determining her whole future.

She drank a whole cup of tea before facing the letter. It was from Anne Sheldon. Dear Anne, she had been so anxious to help this past winter, even from thousands of miles away. "Do come over and stay with us for a while," she had pleaded over the phone. "It will help you get over the worst." Tempting as it was, Julia had resisted. Not surprisingly, this letter was a renewal of the invitation. But it continued with reminiscences about years gone by. "I still find it incredible that the circle has been broken. Even though we saw each other so rarely, we kept in touch, and I had visions of someday planning a marvelous reunion for the five of us — have you seen Nigel since you've been back in England? Next year, it will be twenty-five years since we went down, and I had thought that if you and Frank had some home leave, then we would come over, and the five of us might have made an occasion of it."

The letter continued with news that Anne's daughter, Diana, and her new husband were about to arrive in London, where Chip would spend the summer doing research. But Julia, having absorbed this bulletin, went back to reread the first part of the letter. Was it twenty-five years since they had left Oxford?

She tried to recapture the memory of those golden years. She knew Anne from the beginning because they had adjoining rooms in college in their first year. Both were reading for a history degree. In their second year, they met Frank and Nigel, friends from childhood who had gone to the same schools and were now together at the same college. Bob Sheldon had just arrived, a Rhodes scholar from Princeton. Anne and Bob and Frank and she quickly paired off . Nigel had a succession of girlfriends, seemingly unable to find one he could commit to. Usually, the current girlfriend would join whatever jaunt they were undertaking, but sometimes Nigel would come along unaccompanied, and one of the delightful aspects of this group friendship was that it didn't matter whether they were five or six.

For two glorious years they studied together, punted on the river together, cycled out to pubs at Witney and Abingdon, sat in each other's rooms, drinking coffee or wine, listening to music, talking, arguing, growing up together. Then suddenly, it was over, and they were scattered across the world — Bob back to America taking Anne with him, Frank off to serve Her Majesty in the Foreign Service with Julia in tow, and Nigel ...

Yes, she had seen Nigel. Nigel had come to Frank's memorial service. It had been a fleeting exchange, a warm hug, an awkward fumbling for the right words to say, and then he had yielded to the next sympathizer in line. But of course he didn't know what to say, Julia thought now. How could he? He never married, never did make that commitment. Whenever she and Frank were back on home leave, they would have dinner with him, and without fail, the question of Nigel's bachelor status would come up.

"No," he would say, "I haven't found her yet. It's hard to ask a woman to be a policeman's wife. I work long hours, and it's sometimes dangerous. She'd have to make sacrifices."

"But look at Julia," Frank would reply. "She abandoned any hope of a career of her own when she married me. There are women who will make sacrifices for a good, loving partnership."

But Nigel would just shake his head and repeat that he hadn't found one. Even in later years, as he rose to the upper ranks at Scotland Yard and his work became less dangerous, even if more time-consuming, he repeated the same arguments. "The man is married to his job" was Frank's conclusion.

Recalling all this now, Julia wondered about her acquiescence in sacrificing her own career prospects for Frank's. She had enjoyed the opportunity to live in many different countries, meeting so many different people, experiencing vicariously Frank's steady acquisition of power and status. But where did this leave her now, a widow, their one child grown and launched, and years of life yawning ahead? She was comfortably provided for, but she couldn't just sit in this pretty cottage and vegetate. Yet who would employ a middle-aged woman with no work experience? And how was she to face all this alone?

The ringing of the phone checked this dangerous descent into self-pity. It was Emma, confirming that her mother was safely home from London. How was the flower show? How was Cousin Jane? What a shame there were tenants in the fl at. It would have been so much closer to Chelsea, and she wouldn't have had to put up with Cousin Jane.

"But I only went because Jane had tickets for the flower show and invited me," Julia protested. "She's not really difficult, just a lonely old woman."

Julia knew that she couldn't have gone to the flat anyway, not yet. This country cottage was neutral territory compared with the London fl at, her only true home with Frank, the place to which they had returned on home leaves and to which one day they planned to retire. She couldn't face the fl at just yet.

The phone call, however, had snapped the self-indulgent reverie provoked by Anne's letter. Julia went back to the conservatory, poured out one last cup of tea, little better than lukewarm by now, and resolutely turned her attention to the newspapers. Reading the local newspaper faithfully each week was helping her learn more about this part of Somerset, which she knew so slightly. Her father had bought the cottage in Blymton on his retirement just five years ago. The family had no prior connection with the village.

It was a comfortable cottage. Like most houses in the village, it was built with local stone and roofed with red tile. The oldest part went back to the sixteenth century, but previous owners had remodeled and modernized it to meet modern standards of comfort without seriously impinging on its charm. The garden was the right size, a small area in front between the cottage and the road and a larger piece at the back, big enough to challenge her horticultural skills yet not so big as to be daunting.

But before she could decide whether to keep the cottage, she must find out more about the area. The village of Blymton was the usual mixture of quaint and modern. It had a focal point where three roads met in the Market Cross, an open stone structure dating to the fourteenth century. Here local farmers once marketed their produce; now it harbored gatherings of boisterous teenagers. The parish church adjacent to the Market Cross also dated from the fourteenth century, and one or two other buildings were equally ancient. But many of the houses and shops, though old, had been modernized beginning in the 1960s, and later there was a frenzy of new development on the fringes of the village. The new houses had been built with local stone so as to blend in as much as possible with the older buildings, but Julia had the impression that the character of the village had changed somehow with this influx of newcomers. She suspected that beneath the picture-postcard prettiness, there lurked a plethora of demons.

Some of this was reflected in the front page of the local paper — a medley of wife batterings, youngsters racing their motorbikes through the village, multicar accidents on the nearby M5. That was the reality. The coziness was only skin-deep. It was like the garden. Surveying it now from the conservatory, she saw only beauty and serenity. But if she went outside and bent down to examine the plants, she would see signs of borers in the iris, aphids sucking the life out of rosebuds, grubs burrowing in the soil.

But, she told herself resolutely, it's not only in Blymton. And I have to live somewhere. She continued turning the pages slowly, scanning both news and advertisements. She even ran her eye over the small print announcing births, engagements, marriages, and deaths and there, for the first time, spotted a name that meant something to her: the announcement of the engagement of Hilary Worthington, daughter of Mr. Ernest Worthington, DVM, and the late Mrs. Ernest Worthington, to Brian Dixon, son of Mrs. Myra Dixon and the late Mr. William Dixon.

The Worthingtons were her next-door neighbors. He was a portly, choleric man, not the vet I would choose if I had a sick cat, Julia thought, though I believe his practice is mainly farm animals. He had a shingle on the gate of his house, but he worked from a surgery at the other end of the village. According to village gossip, his elderly mother, who lived with him and helped him bring up his two teenage children, was a Bible-quoting teetotaler. As old Mrs. Worthington was something of a recluse, Julia had not seen her in the couple of months she had been living in the cottage. Nor had she seen much of the younger child, a sullen boy of about fourteen who was said to be as disagreeable as his father.

But Hilary was different. Hilary would knock at the door to see if Julia needed anything from the shops in the village. Hilary helped her identify some of the plants that began to shoot up in the garden with the advent of spring. She was a very pleasant, open, trusting child — yes, still very much a child, still at school, couldn't be more than seventeen, so why was she getting engaged? And who was Brian Dixon? The name sounded familiar, but Julia couldn't place it. Was this one of those situations where the young people have to get married because there's a baby on the way? Or did Hilary just want to get away from home?

I'll have to ask Mrs. Mudge, she decided. Mrs. Mudge, the cleaning woman she had inherited along with the cottage, was a wonderful source of village news. Every Friday morning, after Mrs. Mudge had finished the upstairs cleaning, the two of them would sit down with a cup of coffee and have a half-hour's chat about the latest local scandal and where the best bargains were. Mrs. Mudge had advised her on where to get the car serviced, who sold the freshest fish, and what was the quickest back lanes route to Taunton. When the washing machine broke down, Mrs. Mudge knew whom to call. Julia sometimes wondered how on earth she would have got along without her.